Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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Your problem is that you're not a Thought Leader whose Insights are being brokered by a Community Engagement Specialist.

Good point.

It's a very light article, written for people who listen to Thot Leaders. It misses most of the important points.

Go is designed for web back ends. It has all the stuff you need for that, and the libraries have been thoroughly pounded on and debugged, because Google uses them internally. The language is stable and doesn't change much. It's a good fit to that job.

For other applications, Go may or may not be a good fit. Desktop apps? Probably not. Games? Probably not. Real-time control? No.

Rust now seems to be trying to use every cool idea around, all at once. The borrow checker was brilliant. The added cruft, not so much. We have generics! We have type theory! We have lambdas! We have functional programming! We have threads! We have futures! We have async! We have a whole bunch of different HTTP libraries! We've changed the error handling system how many times now? It's all very cleverly done. But it's overdone. I'm out of that world, and not clear on whether there are signs of it settling down yet.

> Thot Leaders

That's a completely different industry, I think.

> The added cruft, not so much. We have generics! We have type theory! We have lambdas! We have functional programming! We have threads! We have futures! We have async!

Generics, lambdas, and threads are must-have basics. Futures and async are the same thing. Rust doesn't "have functional programming", unless you mean chaining `map` and `collect` methods, in which case Java also has functional programming.

HTTP and error handling are third-party libraries. Multiple choices in this area are a direct result of not trying to bundle the kitchen sink with the language. These things don't standardize in a year.

The issue with Rust is that people actually like using it. So there’s a bunch of development happening purely for enjoyment: why is that an issue? Nobody’s forcing you to keep up with the trends - just stick to the older versions of the libraries and it’ll simply work.

Is there a winner in the HTTP Rust library wars yet? The last time I used Rust, Hyper was on top, but I hear it's no longer cool. "reqwest" is being talked up. You can also get several versions of the same library in the same program through dependency problems.[1]

This is a process problem. The development process for Rust does not seem to force convergence.

[1] https://hackernoon.com/programming-in-rust-the-good-the-bad-...

Reqwest is an easier-to-use wrapper around Hyper. By the same authors.

It's... been hyper for years and is still hyper. Reqwest is an ergonomic wrapper on top of hyper if you want a higher-level API with less control.

Among the Rust ecosystem things to gripe about, this is a odd one.

async_std vs. tokio is the real split-investment battleground these days, effectively undermining the async/await momentum right as it gets out of the gate.

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